Blood of the Reich

by William Dietrich

  His eyes were bright, his skin cracked, his grin a death’s-head grimace. “One of the powers of Vril is that my sexual appetite hasn’t slackened, it’s increased.” He took a small leather folder from the breast pocket of his suit. “So have my tastes.” He flipped it open.

  It held an array of bright, shiny surgical instruments, things to cut and pinch.

  The whine of the machine climbed to a shriek, matching her scream.

  53

  Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland

  October 4, Present Day

  Sam had gotten the Beamer up to 200 kilometers an hour, which he calculated was somewhere north of 125 mph, faster than he’d ever driven. It was gray German autumn, the autobahn his crowded racetrack, and he’d weaved past speeding trucks as if they were standing still. The astonishing thing was that occasionally an Audi or Lotus kept pace with him. What a crazy country. He was gambling where they’d taken Rominy and hoped he got there before the Nazis found skewered Otto back in Wewelsburg, or the German police came after him with too many questions. It was dark by the time he got to Switzerland and Geneva, where he promptly got lost because he was too hurried to ask directions. That’s dude thinking, dude. He finally got straight—everybody seemed to speak some English—and now it was the middle of the night as he drove more cautiously toward CERN headquarters. He was looking for something out of the ordinary and hoped to find Rominy in the middle of it.

  There was a weird globe thingy that looked like salvage from a world’s fair, and a sprawl of office buildings in generic business-park blah. Roads, parking lots, museum signs, the whole nine yards. So he was at one point in a seventeen-mile underground loop he couldn’t even see . . .

  How was he ever going to find Rominy?

  And then there was a cluster of cars and men and bobbing flashlights by some boxy building that looked about as elegant as an airplane hangar. So what was a cluster of men who looked like they were carrying assault rifles doing in the middle of the night in a science park?

  He slowed. Had Rominy left a sign as he’d asked?

  And then he saw it, a scrap that would be taken for insignificant garbage at any other time. It was the white of a khata scarf, the scrap Beth Calloway had used in a Cascades cabin to write a code in invisible ink.

  Rominy had dropped it.

  Bingo. “Mackenzie, you’re not such a bad guide after all,” he murmured.

  Yep, why were the world’s top physicists hanging out in a parking lot in the wee hours of the morning unless they were up to some Nazi-no-good? So all he had to do was . . .

  What? He had Otto’s gun but it was twenty to one, at least. How many skinhead sympathizers were there in the world, anyway? What he really needed was a bazooka, or a battery of Hawk missiles, or the ability to call in an airstrike, but he’d left his Pentagon calling card at home. While the Good Ol’ USA would have had a neon reader board thirty feet high screaming “Guns!” and a cash register line of stubble-head goobers who looked like they shouldn’t be licensed to handle screwdrivers, everything in Europe was very low-key pacifist and urban cool. Where did you get your hands on an RPG launcher when you needed one? Especially on a continent where every town looked as dandy as Disneyland?

  He had to get inside and poke around for Rominy. Which meant getting in the door, which meant distracting the Nazi goons, which meant . . .

  He let his car cruise by the cluster of crazies. They eyed him like an L.A. street gang but didn’t budge. Then buildings shielded him from view, and he looked around.

  Which meant driving full-tilt into something that said Verboten and was decorated with skull and crossbones. Like those tanks behind a cyclone fence next to what looked to be some kind of laboratory.

  “Double bingo.”

  He needed noise. There couldn’t be that many people who’d signed on with that lunatic Raeder, which meant the more folks Sam could pull into ground zero, the more likely someone in authority would start asking the bad guys some awkward questions. And if Otto’s murderous intentions were any indication, Sam Mackenzie needed to hurry.

  Plan One: suicide charge into a tank farm and hope the airbag worked and he was conscious enough to crawl out before he fried.

  Bad plan.

  So how about Plan Two? He parked in the shadows and popped the BMW’s trunk. He took his backpack, stuffed Rominy’s passport and cash with his own belongings, and slung it on his back. There was an emergency kit inside with road flares. There was also a doughnut spare tire, just the size for what he had in mind.

  He drove the BMW to within a hundred yards of the cluster of tanks, aimed the wheels, and used the jumper cables in the rental trunk to clamp the steering wheel to the passenger door handle. That would keep his new robot car on course, he hoped. The Beamer was still rumbling, unaware of its impending sacrifice. Parking brake on. He cradled the spare tire, took it to the front seat, and leaned in.

  “The rental company is going to be very, very pissed,” he whispered to himself.

  He jammed the spare forward under the dash on top of the gas pedal, where it stuck, snug as a cork.

  The engine screamed. Parking brake off. And as Sam sprang backward, the car howled, that beautiful Bavarian whine, and shot forward.

  It was his very own cruise missile. The Beamer accelerated like a drag racer, tires smoking, and hit freeway speeds at the collision point. There was tragic beauty in how it ran straight and true. The coupe smashed through the fence and plowed into the tanks, knocking them sideways. The bang of the collision echoed in the peaceful night air, and he could see the white of the Beamer’s airbags deployed as a building alarm began to sound. There was a gush, and the air smelled like propane.

  The car’s front end had accordioned, steam erupting, but nothing else had happened yet. Sam ran as close as he dared, snapped a highway flare to light it, and threw. Then he dashed away.

  Night flashed into day. A fireball erupted skyward, pieces of tank and car arcing outward like meteors. Then another explosion, and another. He could feel the heat and punches of air.

  Wow, better than the Fourth of July.

  Sam ducked into the shadows. The swarm of men outside the hangarlike building had broken and were running toward the fire he’d set, shouting in German and French and waving guns.

  In the distance he could hear sirens. The concussions from the explosions had set off car alarms.

  “Well, it’s a start.”

  He glanced about and spied a utility pipe grating. Lifting it, he saw metal rungs. He jammed the pack behind them for temporary safekeeping. Then he trotted in the shadows toward his goal.

  “I’m coming, Rominy.”

  There was still a sprawl of cars and vans around the entrance but most of the Nazi goons, if that’s what they were, had been drawn off to investigate. Two remained at the door, holding wicked-looking rifles. Sam didn’t hesitate; if he did, his nerve would fail him. He knew something awful was about to happen to the young woman he’d come to like so much. Sam had Otto’s automatic tucked in the small of his back and a second or two of surprise. He walked forward like he belonged. The men raised their guns.

  “Raeder?” Sam demanded.

  They hesitated, one giving a nod inside and then thinking better of it.

  Triple bingo.

  The Nazi bastard was here all right, which meant Sam’s spectacular arson and Wewelsburg killing just might be justifiable to the authorities, in the unlikely event slacker Mackenzie survived this night. He strode for the door, trying to look as important as the VIPs waved through the velvet rope at a nightclub, rather than the cheap Third World tourist guide he was. Attitude, man.

  The goons hesitated, and Sam guessed these weren’t hired paramilitary but just weekend Nazis told to keep watch while the big dogs worked inside. They shouted some German crap.

  “Stoppen. Wer sind sie?”

  So he pulled the pistol and shot one of them in the leg. Necessity made you one motherfucker of invention, didn’t it?
The man yelped in surprise and fell, writhing. Before the other could lift his assault rifle Sam was on top of him, his barrel pressed against the man’s left eye. “Droppen, you Nazi dick. I’m tired of this shit.” As the man’s gun fell he shoved him through the door, slamming and locking it behind them. “Schnell, schnell,” he ordered, pushing the man down a short corridor. “Yeah, I’ve seen the war movies.”

  A fusillade of shots stuttered through the door he’d just locked. The wounded man didn’t care for being wounded, apparently, and was venting his frustration. The bullet holes popped through the metal like expressions of surprise.

  That was okay. The noise would bring more police.

  There was another door with a keypad next to it. “Open it!”

  His prisoner shook his head, his courage back after the surprise attack.

  So Sam shot him in the foot.

  He yelled and hopped, Sam grabbing his shoulder and pistol-whipping his face. “Open it!” he screamed. He shook his gun. “Or I kill you! Verstehen?” Yeah, he understood.

  Shaking, the guard tapped some numbers. Nothing happened.

  Sam lifted his pistol to the man’s temple. “One.”

  The man was sweating, but frozen.

  “Two . . .” Surely this bastard knew how to count to three in English? “Three is the last word you’re going to hear, Fritz.” Nothing. “Thre . . .” He tightened on the trigger.

  The guard lurched forward, blood gushing from his foot, mouth bruised, and put his eye up against some kind of reader. Now there were shouts outside and more shots. With a bang, the outer lock disintegrated. Damn. The Nazi rescue posse had arrived. They’d probably gotten tired of watching his car burn.

  But now the door Sam needed to get through was opening.

  He brought down his pistol as heavily as he could on the guard’s head, and with a crack the sentry went down. Then the American stepped through and the door slid shut. As he did so he could see men bursting through the outer entrance and spying him. They raised their guns.

  Sam’s door hissed to a close just as another volley of bullets hit it. None penetrated.

  “Good Swiss engineering.” Sam shot a keypad on his side, hoping that would disable the opening mechanism, and looked around. There was an elevator—a box to be trapped in, he feared—and flights of stairs.

  Sam started down the stairs.

  54

  Large Hadron Collider, Geneva, Switzerland

  October 4, Present Day

  You’re too young to fully understand the intellectual marathon I required to get to this point,” Raeder said to Rominy. He regarded her with disappointment. “You’re shaking.”

  “Please don’t hurt me.”

  “I’m going to pleasure you. You’ll see. Pain is exquisite.”

  What could she use as a weapon? Everything was bolted, wired, fused. There were danger signs and voltage warnings.

  “When we found Shambhala,” Raeder went on, “it had a machine much like this one, but we were like cavemen contemplating a computer. We had no idea, really, what it was for, except that it seemed capable of energizing quite marvelous staffs. Then a blizzard of inventions. Radar. Television. Atomic bombs. Microwave ovens. Laser disks. And more than these toys, this incredible creation story being spun out by physicists. A big bang. A divorce between energy and matter. Thirteen billion years of galactic evolution. And even a microscopic wonderland of particles too tiny to ever see, which didn’t even seem to follow the laws of nature. Or rather, we had the laws all wrong at the most fundamental level. Moreover, new kinds of energy and matter we can’t even detect that nonetheless dominate the universe. I began to understand what had infused and powered me, and had infused and powered Shambhala. The legends of the Vril Society were based on truth! So I began to seek out key young physicists who wanted to do more than just watch protons collide. Men and women with ambition. Vision. A sense of history.”

  “German scientists.”

  “Some, but not all.”

  “People of ruthless greed.”

  “The ideals of National Socialism have universal appeal.”

  “Nobody told you that you look embalmed?”

  Some color actually came into his cheeks. “Invigorated, given my age. Potent, as you’ll see.”

  She closed her eyes. “That’s the last thing I want to see.”

  “Eventually I realized that Shambhala had been a supercollider. We began to theorize the staff’s properties. We didn’t have one to study, and no technology to make it, but bright young men could calculate a molecular structure that might carry messages from the string realm and its curled dimensions to our own. Eventually we realized that the energy levels achieved by the Large Hadron Collider at CERN might be enough, if properly diverted, to activate a dark energy flow, if it ran at full power. What we needed was an actual staff, and to get that we needed an actual heir. And if you helped us, how to reward you? By making you mother of the new master race.”

  “I don’t want to be the mother of your damn race! Your stupid lectures are not seductive!”

  The whine was growing louder. “It’s destiny, Rominy. Accept your fate. We’re locked together by blood.” He raised his pistol to aim at her face, his arm rock steady. “There will be a flash of illuminating light such as you’ve never felt before, and it will irradiate every cell in your body. Do not fear. It will only purify, not kill.”

  “Will it hurt?” Her voice broke, and she was struggling not to cry.

  “Yes.”

  Lights flickered. The sound of the machines kept rising, like a building hurricane. Inside its fascist cage, the staff of Shambhala began to glow.

  “I fell unconscious when it happened to me,” he added.

  She glanced wildly about for some way to fight back. All she saw was a web of pipes and power cables, a hive of bus bars, and warning signs in English, French, and German. If she grabbed the wrong thing she would die.

  But was that so bad, given the alternative?

  Then, over the shrill sound of the accelerator, there was a more guttural rattling.

  She looked up. The crane had moved to a point directly above them. And now, from the shadows, a great black chain that had been suspended like the cord of a swag lamp swung down with its heavy yellow hook. It was arcing toward them, a thousand pounds in weight, as powerful as a scythe.

  Riding it was a wild-eyed tour guide. “Rominy, get out of the way!”

  Sam! He was aiming a pistol.

  Raeder shouted in rage and aimed his own gun.

  Rominy leaped and bit his hand.

  He howled, both men shooting as Sam swept down like some demented Tarzan, bullets ricocheting like popcorn.

  Rominy bit harder. Raeder, snarling, hurled her aside, his strength immense, inhuman. She skidded on the slick floor.

  But the chain, which had been suspended above, cut down through the tunnel air with the power of a wrecking ball, clearing the cement floor by inches. With a tremendous clang it smashed into the side of the metal cage where the Shambhala staff glowed and knocked the whole apparatus askew. Sam went flying toward the piping on the far wall and hit the cables. There was a crack like thunder and a flash as blinding as the sun. Then all light winked out.

  With a groan, the whine of the accelerator began to drop, its power short-circuited. They’d blown the mother of all fuses, apparently.

  And, much to her amazement, Rominy was still alive.

  Red emergency lighting came on. Sam lay like a dead man, clothes smoking, obviously electrocuted. The great chain and hook had come to rest against the pipe it had ruptured. The break sizzled, and a fog was filling the room. The Klaxons of alarms were going off, and she thought she could hear distant shooting.

  Where was Raeder?

  She got to her hands and knees. She was shaking, whether from fear or adrenaline she wasn’t sure. Probably both. She crawled to Sam and bent to his lips.

  The wispiest of breaths. Barely, he was alive.

 
Rominy looked around. Two pistols lay on the floor. And half falling out of its bent cradle and still glowing faintly was the crystalline staff.

  She could smell burning rubber and plastic.

  Then a figure staggered out of the smoke and mist. It was Kurt.

  Now he looked every bit his hundred and ten years, gaunt, lined, exhausted, furious. He lurched toward her like a broken monster, eyes filled with disbelief.

  “He displaced the magnets,” the German croaked. “Proton beam. It went out of alignment. Seven trillion volts.”

  She didn’t understand what he meant. But then she saw his head droop toward his torso. His shirt had been sliced open and there was a thin black line etched halfway across his chest. Even as he stared, it began to bleed the thinnest of sheets.

  “The idiot cut me in two.” Then Raeder collapsed.

  Now Rominy could hear explosions in the rooms above, shouts, doors slamming. It sounded like a battle. She had to hide! She no longer knew whom to trust, except Sam, who had somehow miraculously escaped Wewelsburg only to fry here! Should she stay with him? Take a gun?

  Then she saw motion at the far end of the balcony they’d used to get to this chamber. She recognized the silhouette with sick dread. It was Jake.

  A voice came into her head, a presence she’d never felt before. Take the staff. She flushed and felt renewed from a burst of energy. And knew, instantly, that she’d heard the voice of Benjamin Hood.

  She looked around. Was he here?

  Nothing. But his spirit? That was present. Take the staff.

  She hesitated only a moment. Then she seized the crystalline rod, stood, and began a stumbling run into the tunnel where the big blue pipe ran. The rod vibrated slightly, making her palm tingle. Jake must not get his hands on the staff, not when it might have absorbed the necessary energy. So she fled in the only direction she could, straight down an apparently endless tunnel. She didn’t know where else to go. She began running faster as the shock wore off, carrying the ancient artifact. The tunnel gently curved, she realized, just as Jake had said it would. How long had he said the tube was? Seventeen miles?